Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (3 page)

“You and your sister will live here, at Tsarskoe Selo. It was your father’s wish.”

“Thank you, your—”

“Please,” the tsarina said, and she shook her finger as though at a naughty child. “No titles. And no more curtsies either.”

I nodded. My head seemed to bob up and down on its own. Without falling back on prescribed formalities, I had little to say, and my eyes strayed to the books on the tsarina’s shelves and the paintings on her wall. History, mostly of the Orthodox Church, theology, and landscapes of mauve rivers and mauve forests and fields, mauve haystacks and mauve mountains. Suddenly, then, the overhead light went on and I saw that the tsarina had risen from her pillows. Sitting up straight as a fence post, her hand still on the switch plate, she was breathing rapidly and her eyes were frantic and bright, almost glittering. I wondered if she was suffering an attack of some kind, and I was on the point of calling for help when she reached out and seized my hand.

“I know it’s in you,” she said. Her hand wasn’t, like her words, feverish but as cold as though she had one foot in her grave. Other than suppressing a shudder, I didn’t respond to her assertion. Cryptic as it was, I could pretend I didn’t understand her meaning, and I remained silent under her stare. The voluble self I knew seemed to have parted company with me, and I felt as though I were inhabited by a stranger, her expression blank, seamless as an egg.

“That’s why he made Nikolay Alexandrovich your guardian, yours and your sister’s.” The tsarina’s eyes didn’t focus on my face so much as they approached it as they would the lid of a box. I could feel her looking for a place to pry me open and peer inside. “Your father wouldn’t have left Alyosha without having planned for his future. He sent you to us. He wanted you near the tsarevich, to keep him from harm. To heal him when he is ill and to comfort him. He sent you here for Alyosha. For Alyosha and for Russia as well.”

So I wasn’t beyond being shocked anew, as that declaration had my mouth open before I had anything to say. It was rumored the tsarevich had been a terror as a little boy, spoiled by a family and servants who couldn’t bear to deny a sick child whatever he asked, as long as it couldn’t harm him. At table he’d taken food from others’ plates, kicked and cried whenever he was disciplined. The risk that he might do himself injury while thrashing about was so great that soon even the hint of a tantrum’s approach guaranteed his demands would be satisfied immediately. Even were he no longer inclined to such tricks, he would still be accustomed to getting what he wanted.

“How do you know he didn’t send Varya?” I asked, surprising myself with my own impertinence, but the tsarina laughed. At least I hadn’t been so forward as to suggest my father might have put his daughters in the care of the tsar to protect us rather than the tsarevich.

“You know, Matryona Grigorievna—Masha—that it is you who takes after your father. And I’m not speaking of your blue eyes and black hair.” She squeezed my fingers with sudden strength. “You know I am right.”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed rude not to agree. I’d thought to claim my portion of the Neva’s water, but then I asked myself what it could give me that I didn’t already have. The tsarina was right, I did take after my father, if not in the one way she hoped.

The color of the tsarina’s lips was the same, exactly the same, as that of the cushion behind her head. I wondered why she didn’t trouble to rouge them and then asked myself why I was dwelling on so trivial a matter. Alexandra Fyodorovna. I’d never before thought of the tsarina as an ordinary woman, with a name like other women have, lying on a chair with a little table at her side and on it a crumpled handkerchief and a plain glass of water, half drunk, next to a small, worn Orthodox prayer book. The book
had a red ribbon between its pages, to keep a reader’s place, and the ribbon’s unraveling at the end caught and for a moment held my eye. Alexandra Fyodorovna was the same as any other woman, the same and no different, and her health was poor; she was frightened for the safety of her son. I could feel her anxiety, even see its shadow pass across her features, as though a cloud had come between her and the light from overhead.

“What is it, my daughter?” she said, as if she’d perceived the shift in my understanding of her. “Do you mind if I call you my daughter?”

“No. You may, of course, call me what you please.” No matter what came out of my mouth, it sounded different from the way I’d meant it to. Either it was overly familiar or courteous to the point of seeming insincere.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to sit down?” Alexandra Fyodorovna said. “You’re pale.”

A telephone call away, that’s all Father had been. The tsarina’s driver would have left to fetch my father before she picked up the receiver to summon him, and Father would be delivered to the Alexander Palace in less than an hour. But now he was dead, no longer at her side to provide her strength, and the tsarina’s weak heart was beginning to fail. She’d always had bad spells, as I knew from my father, a month or more of breathlessness that kept her confined to bed, but I never imagined anyone could look as haggard as she did now. The continuing strain of the war against Germany; the food shortages; the strikes and the rioting; the long days she spent nursing moribund soldiers in one of the Red Cross’s makeshift hospitals (for she was always greedy for good works, for opportunities to sacrifice herself in the name of God and country): all of these had taken their toll on the woman my father and every other Russian peasant had learned to call Little Mother—
Mamochka
.

Mamochka
, Father always said when he bent to kiss her jeweled white hand. I never heard him call her by any other name.

“How, then,” I said to the tsarina, “shall I address you?”

“In any way that you are comfortable, Masha. We are a family now, the Romanovs and the daughters of Father Grigory. Your father himself has ordained it. We no longer stand on ceremony. We are equals.”

This seemed unlikely—ridiculous. Still, I nodded and smiled politely.

B
UT
A
LEXANDRA
F
YODOROVNA WAS RIGHT
. Or, if she wasn’t right on the first day of 1917, she would be by the ides of March, when Tsar Nikolay was forced to surrender his throne, a blow she’d receive with the grace and fortitude expected of her station and that would complete the job of ruining her health irrevocably. Of course, the abdication of Nikolay II, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, was a shock not only to us but to all the world, the kind of warning that ought to have been delivered by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rather than a plain little military detail, for life as we knew it was over and Armageddon begun.

As for the tsarina, once she’d fulfilled the obligations of the wife of a deposed ruler (which was mostly, as far as I could tell, finding and burning whatever might be misconstrued as evidence of her husband’s having exploited the proletariat for the advancement of decadent, royalist agendas, should he be tried), she took to her bed once and for all, too distraught to tend to her own children, her four strapping daughters and Alyosha, the long awaited, greatly desired, and gravely ill son she bore for tsar and emperor, for Russia. The boy on whom so many hopes had been laid.

Lucky for me, to whom it fell—as good as by decree—to comfort
Alyosha and keep him amused when he was confined to bed, it turned out the tsarevich was intoxicated by every detail of a country person’s simple life. He asked to hear about my father as a boy and what it was people did to amuse themselves in faraway Siberia. I could tell he pictured it all wrong, imagining everything east of the Urals to be a kind of uncharted territory without a single modern convenience—no train, no telegraph or telephone, no electricity or indoor plumbing. All of us squatting in yurts, stitching up hides into trousers and tunics, and wearing underclothes made of yarn from off our spinning wheels. Riding wild Tartar ponies and murdering, raping, and pillaging one another as a matter of course with our blackened frostbitten ears and fingers falling off. The kind of life a rich and pampered boy might think wild and romantic.

“Like Temujin!” he said, delighted with the idea.

“Who?”

“The Khan Temujin. Genghis Khan. Don’t you know anything, Masha?”

“A lot more than you do. Just not every detail about every last uncivilized warmonger. And, no, it was not like that. Fewer people and buildings, more flowers and less soot, that’s what it was.”

But Alyosha was no different from the rest of the Petersburg aristocrats who took one look at my father’s ill-kempt beard and threadbare tunic and confused him with Jesus. I told Alyosha no one back home ever had to worry about amusing themselves, as every member of a country family had to work all day to keep bread on the table. But to a bedridden prince, this, too, sounded like fun.

Of course, I had to tell Alyosha about Baba Yaga, for what proper Russian leaves childhood behind without learning about Baba Yaga and her hut? Somehow he’d got to the grand age of thirteen without having heard of her.

I told him Baba Yaga lived in the forest in a hut that danced on the legs of a chicken, sliding sideways through the trees and shadows, and I recited the magic words to speak at its door.
Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest, your front to me
.

“A new one,” Alyosha would say when I asked him what story to tell, and I did, more times than I can count. I made them up from bits and pieces of other tales, from what I knew and what I didn’t know I knew. Usually, the words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to think them through, entertaining me as well. Alyosha—Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov—was a big boy, tall and sturdy for his age. But when he was ill, feverish and in pain, he liked to be babied. When he was ill you couldn’t imagine the boy he was when he was well, a boy whose nickname was Sunbeam; that was how easy it was for him to make others smile. But Sunbeam had inherited the English disease from Queen Victoria, his mother’s grandmother, an illness carried by females and suffered by males, a torture whose name was never spoken, not even by court physicians. Especially not by court physicians. The threat to the tsarevich’s life inspired fear so intense that to say its name aloud was dangerous and would have been unlawful had anyone been given leave to set the word down in ink. If the people were to learn that the crown prince—the future tsar and heir to the world’s greatest autocracy, ruler-to-be of two hundred million souls—could bleed to death from a tumble down the stairs or a bump on the nose, Russia’s ebbing faith in her government would drain away all the more quickly, hurrying the collapse of three centuries of Romanov rule and of tsarism itself.

Hemophilia: for all it was spoken, the word might as well have not been invented.

House Arrest

F
EBRUARY 1917 BROUGHT TEMPERATURES
so low a thousand locomotive boilers froze and burst, each stranding as many as fifty cars. And not one of the few trains left running could enter Petersburg; every track leading into the capital had been buried in drifts. The laborers who would otherwise have dug them out were dying at the front, a line that moved over the continent as fire does through the dry grass of the steppes, leaving smoke and ruin in its wake. No flour was delivered to the city, no butter, and no sugar. Without coal, lights dimmed and flickered. Newspapers went unpublished. The letters I wrote and mailed to my mother never reached her. The telegraph office was closed. Actors performed to empty houses, as did musicians and ballerinas. And vodka poured from water faucets and ran in the gutters—it must have, for never has there been, neither before nor after, such uniformity of drunkenness. Inebriated bands of looters broke into bakeries and smashed storefronts to make off with bread, while a few doors down the Nevsky Prospekt the windows of Fabergé remained intact, crusts suddenly more valuable than cabochons.

Corpses piled up in the streets. Every so often, the wagon from the potter’s field would stop; then two men jumped down and picked up one body after another. The first man took the corpse by the hands, the second grabbed the feet, and together they swung it
onto the growing heap. When they’d collected all they could, they drove the bodies to a pit, dropped them in, poured on the quicklime, and went back to the streets for more. It looked as if St. Petersburg was dying as she had been born, thousands of unknown and uncounted workers dumped in communal graves.

“How strange and claustrophobic it must be for the dead who haven’t a private grave or even a coffin. I’m sure such things are as important to the dead as to the living.”

“What peculiar things you say, Masha.”

“I can’t not think of them, poor things, all heaped together on top of one another, having to molder next to strangers, the dust of one life mingling with that of another. And very lonely, as no one can come calling on a person without a headstone.”

“There’s no point in thinking of them at all, as they are dead and you didn’t know them.”

“I know you consider yourself very clever, your highness, but not all thoughts are undertaken with a purpose. They just arrive, that’s all.”